Why not just stack rank h1b applicants by salary instead of using a lottery system? That forces the income levels up which should benefit Americans workers as well.
In the case of a long-term, widespread shortage, rising salaries would lead to a widespread increase in people training to enter the industry. This is exactly what's been happening with software the past several years.
I don't know about the specific case of Arabic translators, but that's far from the only possible outcome. It's also likely that you won't find one at any price that your poor Arabic-speaking parents can possibly afford to pay to attend your parent-teacher conference meetings, and you end up with no translator at all.
If you have static demand and it is possible to train to meet the need, you shouldn't have long-term shortages, but dynamically increasing needs can produce a long-term gap, where you are continuously playing catch up.
If H-1B was well adapted to real shortages, the continuous use in tech would indicate such a persistent dynamic shortage. I don't think that's the real condition, and I don't think H-1B is well adapted to serve only real shortages, but the idea of real, including persistent, shortages that price signalling alone doesn’t suffice to close is not to be dismissed.
There are over a million Arabic speakers in the US, hundreds of thousands of whom are legally able to do the work. I strongly suspect that a number sufficient to handle the city of Detroit's translation needs could be brought in at under (likely far under) the rates proposed above. Having done translation work myself, I can say the pay is often startlingly low!
In the unlikely case that weren't possible, the necessary salary would exceed the H1B qualifying threshold, and translators could be imported to do the work.
What exactly are you arguing here? In what situation would a shortage truly require importing labor at low wages? As they are now, H1Bs suppress wages, especially immigrant wages.
That's an argument that there is not an actual shortage (which, I suspect, is correct), not that an actual shortage could be addressed by bidding higher with wages (which it could not, by definition.)
> What exactly are you arguing here?
Your incorrect statement about an actual shortage being addressable by bidding higher with wages.
> In what situation would a shortage truly require importing labor at low wages?
I wasn't arguing that would occur, but since you ask, a sudden supply constraint or demand surge (perhaps from a debilitating epidemic that spreads particularly well in conditions associated with a particular job) in an essential, common, but not completely unskilled job might require that to avoid massive economic disruption.
> As they are now, H1Bs suppress wages, especially immigrant wages.
I'm not sure I agree with the “especially” part, but, yes, I've said elsewhere in the thread that that is what H-1Bs do, and by design even if it's not the sales pitch.
In contrast, adrr's suggestion above to "stack rank h1b applicants by salary instead of using a lottery system" would result in a system where H-1B holding immigrants are well-paid and "shortages" result in rising wages over time.
Re: sudden shocks, I agree with you. Market pricing will tend to fix imbalances over time (barring extreme regulation or other distortions), but it does take time. In a truly extraordinary situation such as you suggest where huge swaths of the population are suddenly dead or incapacitated, you'd have a reasonable argument against market pricing. I don't believe the H-1B was ever intended for such catastrophic scenarios, though.
May be grouping by job-type, location(cost of living concern) and then stack ranked might be better solution.
Although, who’s to then decide how many software engineers or artists to be allowed? Not an easy answer for sure.